abject learning

We hosted the IMS Technical Forum here at UBC last week — I personally attended the spin-off Eduspecs meetings and the subsequent Open Technical Forum. I’m still processing what went on, but it’s safe to say that the Canadian contingent took the opportunity to forcefully articulate emerging views on learning standards and their adoption that are making the rounds north of the 49th parallel…

At the meetings I enjoyed a brief chat with Wilbert Kraan, a very nice fellow representing CETIS, and he does a nice job of summarizing the event, with a special focus on the Canuck contribution.

There already are a number of specific, working communities in Canada and beyond that are delivering practical, standards based solutions. One is the eduSource network of learning object repositories. They’ve been busy building infrastructure, but, as Douglas MacLeod of the project pointed out: the issue is not technology, but community building. Making sure that what you build meets everyone’s needs. Much the same sentiment was voiced by people involved in setting up provincial portals like Alberta’s, which aims to get teachers, authorities, curriculum experts and industry on board and cooperating.

This is not limited to just Canada. In IBM’s Chuck Hamilton oriola cookie schema of learning objects, elearning been busy at the technical core (packaging, metadata), but now really need to move to the human outer rings (presentation, information flow, collaboration). As he put it, we need to move away from decontextualised ‘prisonware’ to properly socially contextualised learning experiences.

David Porter’s Learning Technologies Program NewMedia Innovation Centre is doing exactly that with a range of ‘convivial tools’: tools that are relatively small, run on your PC and have an immediately graspable purpose. Thinks Napsters for education. At present, they already developed eduSplash, a personal repository that hooks into various institutional repositories and makes content widely available. In the same vein, there’s the Possibility network, a personal portal that gets the content you want to your site on your machine.

Community is also a driving factor in the ongoing discussion about conformance. As Peter Hope of the Canadian Department of Defense pointed out, one reason for pushing for conformance is to prevent vendors from having to retest their tools every time another institution is looking to procure some tools. Do it is as a community, and vendors have to do it only once. More than that, the one well designed suite they are planning to build could test a large number of application profiles and specs. This is important, because, as Dick Hill of UK eUniversities found, the most important question to ask of specifications is why they are important to you. i.e. which ones you need for your community in order to do what you want them to do.

The description:

The SCHEMAS Registry contains several metadata element sets as well as a large number of activity reports which describe and comment on various metadata related activities and initiatives. Work on the SCHEMAS Registry is now being taken forward as part of CORES project.

Via Stephen Downes, who notes that the ‘first – and potentially most useful – bit of work advanced by this project is to create “a simple Web interface for projects and services to self-register their schemas.” The site also has tools and resources to help developers write and use schemas.’

If you find yourself trapped listening to some wanker go on and on about the boundless potential of learning objects, and the gains for efficiency by using them, ask the wanker to cite examples of LOs actually being reused in practice.

An embarrassed, confused silence is likely to follow. You may be asking an unfair question, given the novelty of this approach and the immaturity of the so-called learning object economy. But administrators have a responsibility to ask unfair questions when it comes time to dispense project funding. This is an unfair question that needs to be asked…

Clearly there are institutional and/or cultural barriers to the sharing of digital learning resources. The University of Waterloo-led CLOE project has identified the elements of a learning object, and the considerations that go into sharing, finding, and reusing them. This media-rich presentation is done with the care and craft that I’ve come to expect from Waterloo’s LT3 unit.

And as the somewhat hysterical headline to this posting indicates, they’ve also posted an interesting case story of how a learning object, created at the University of Waterloo for a Kinesiology course, gets reused at the University of Guelph in an Equine Studies Online Distance Course. The presentation tells “the learning object’s story — from the perspective of the creator, the reuser, and a few people in between. “